Using Instagram in Student Ministry

Over the past few months I have been using Instagram more and more in our student ministry. For a long time Facebook was the best place to be for promoting events and connecting with students online. However, students are leaving Facebook and spending more time on Twitter and Instagram (click here to see how you can use Twitter in your student ministry). Even though I still use Facebook and Twitter in our student ministry, I am spending more time and putting more energy into using Instagram. I want to share with you a few thoughts on using Instagram in student ministry.

Create an Instagram profile for your student ministry. Everything I share from this point forward will be pointless if you don’t already have an Instagram profile. You may have a personal profile for yourself, but I would encourage you to make one for your student ministry. We have a Instagram profile for both our middle school ministry and high school ministry.

Promotion. The main way you can use Instagram in your ministry is for promoting upcoming events, series, and your student ministry in general. Whenever we start a new a series I will post the series graphic on our Instagram and invite students to join us for the start of that series. Also, when events are coming up I will use Instagram to promote it weeks leading up to the event. Not only series and events, but we use Instagram to simply get the word out about our ministry and when we meet. Every Tuesday morning, I post something on high school ministry Instagram inviting students to join us that night for our weekly gathering. I do the same every Wednesday morning for our middle school ministry. The best way to create a quality graphic for promoting things on Instagram is to use the app Over. It’s simple and easy to use.

Connect with students. I know connecting with students in person is way better than online, but let’s face it, we would be foolish to totally ignore the fact that we can effectively connect with students online as well. Instagram is a great place to do just that. This may be best done with your personal Instagram account instead of the student ministry account, but either way, connect with your students. “Like” their pics and even comment when it’s appropriate.

Post pictures and videos instantly from an event or during your weekly program. Whenever your in the middle of an event, retreat, mission trip, or weekly program, post a picture or video so others can see what’s going on. This is a great way for other students to see what your ministry is like. They may see a picture and want to come and check out your ministry! Also, this is a great way for parents to see pictures of their children and the ministry they are in. Plus, students will see pictures of themselves later on and generate some traffic as they “like” it and maybe comment on it.

Live pictures. There is this awesome program called Instafeed Live you can use to have Instagram photos be posted live on the screen at your event or weekly program. You simply create a hashtag for your ministry or an event then when students post a picture on Instagram with that hashtag in the caption it comes up on the screen. It will then live stream all the pictures that have posted with that hashtag. We used this at one of our events this past Fall and the students loved it!

You may be doing some of these things already, but if not, consider leveraging Instagram in your student ministry. Students are there and it’s a great place to get the word out about your ministry.

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Published by Austin McCann

Austin is the student ministries director at Redemption Chapel in Stow, OH. He has a BA from Piedmont International University and a Master of Arts in Religion with a Christian leadership focus from Liberty University School of Divinity. Austin enjoys reading, writing, playing basketball and golf, and spending time with his family.
View all posts by Austin McCann

2 thoughts on “Using Instagram in Student Ministry”

On our First Time Here information cards, we ask students to circle which social media they use. Instagram is far and away the go-to choice for our students. We’ve had good responses with 3 kinds of posts in particular:

1) Set List
We make a simple graphic on Canva.com with the 2 or 3 songs we’re singing on Sunday and post the songs in advance.

2) Volunteer Spotlight
We post pics of our new and current volunteers in action. This is a great way for students to get to know the volunteers and for the volunteers to feel appreciated.

3) Random Fun
Find .gifs, pics, and memes that are just plain fun. For example, we were teaching on the Ten Commandments and we posted a great pic of the Hillbilly Ten Commandments. It was our most “liked” picture of the month by a landslide!